Unknown: Scrawled on a Coffee-Stained Napkin
Featured, Meditations — By Kirsten Penner Krymusa on February 14, 2010 at 12:00 amYou sit across t
he coffee shop with a white turban, each crease folded with care, undulating like lines in the Mombasa sand at low tide. I watch you sipping espresso and fiddling with your phone, and I realize there are no enemies. Only others who are really us, but for the gap of knowing. If only we were knowing. If I could know the name of your daughter in med school and the color of your wife’s shimmering sari. If I could know the journey from your childhood over the oceans here to this morning and this conversation with the freckled man across the table, then you would become us and there would be no other.
It’s the same for everyone. Yet we work so hard at not knowing. At walls, boundaries, rhetoric. For all our traveling and internet networking, we really aren’t knowing. Even our friends are objects on a screen, thumbnails and login names, remaining safely other.
Because what would happen if we really knew? If the frizzy-haired woman with the bird nose and the scowl across the aisle actually knew me, and hugged my children, and saw my tears of fatigue? Then maybe I’d end up hugging her too and she’d see my obsessions and suddenly there would be no room for all my entertaining judgments. Because of course I like the comfort of other. Of being able to compare and come out triumphant. Of projecting extremism on the turban and cowardice on the frizzy hair and snobbery on the silvery strappy heels that swing beneath the good-looking lovers in the corner.
Forgive us for our refusal to know and be known. For our die-hard commitment to maintaining otherness and enemies. Forgive us for our unknowing.
14 Comments
brillaint
Thank you. You’ve said these important things well.
How true. Well said dear daughter.
interesting to think about how the internet connects us vs. keeps us separate….which is it? is our world becoming more “knowing” or moving in the other direction?
I find it interesting that you assume the man in the turban came from another country and that his wife, if he has one, wears a sari.
I find it interesting that you seem to have missed the point of a very touching article.
You’re right, Trisha, that that might seem like a stereotypical assumption. I’m writing from Nairobi, Kenya, in a coffee shop in the diplomatic sector of the city where I regularly observe the very diverse international clientele. I’m quite familiar with the Indian/Asian community here and am pretty sure it wasn’t a stretch to assume his wife wears a sari and that his roots, at least at some point, are across the ocean. I’m sorry if it came across as an ignorant judgment. That definitely was not my intention. Though it’s true, I don’t know him. My assumptions still could have been wrong, and I guess that’s part of my struggle in the piece.
Again, it seems to me that you both missed the point. Are you not trying to be so “politically correct” that you missed the “intent” of the article and of the author. It would be one thing if the article came from a mean spirited person with an ax to grind. This article clearly was not. Lighten up, as Odd Ball commented in the movie “Kelly’s Heros”: “Why dont you knock it off with those negative waves? Why dont you dig on how beautiful it is out here?”.
billybob said: “Again, it seems to me that you both missed the point”… er, I think Kirsten *is* the author and couldn’t really miss the point… Just a hunch. Did you read her response to Trisha or just the first sentence?
Thank you billybob.
Kirsten your napkin notes are great.
Kirsten, you never disappoint. Always inviting us to broader, more expansive ways of being and seeing, and challenging us on the most important things. Thank you for your voice.
Brilliant. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate your poetic way of challenging the Collective to be more inclusive.
Thank you, a nice reminder.
-Jonny
Nice piece K. Kind of reminds me of Jesus, the boundary breaker, when he declared: “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”